Franz Bruckhoff

Franz Bruckhoff is a German developer who has built iOS apps since 2008, mostly solo with a few creative collaborators, under his studio Taptanium. His nature-sound and weather apps have reached more than 5 million people and still serve around 100K monthly users; he says on X he has shipped seven App Store chart hits and earns about $40K MRR.

His catalog includes Windy, which once had over 1.2 million downloads in a single day, Windy Pro, Thunderspace, Rainlayer, Flowing, Sunny and Haze, a weather app that briefly topped the charts. Earlier he made Holographium, a 3D light-painting app featured in an Apple iPad Air 2 TV spot.

He now runs an AI lab working on a neurosymbolic system and a recursive ideation system, builds Substrate at Stratington, a neurosymbolic engine that turns explanations of how systems work into runnable models, and wrote the Think Bigger framework on running long engineering efforts with small AI-assisted teams. He also takes on AI consulting.